Terrell Odom

You are standing in Gary Dombrowski's kitchen in Pittsburgh, nearly midnight, and his knees ache on the linoleum. Fifty-four years in him, one minute, and already you know what he is: a ledger in a body. Quarterly numbers. A beard that itches. A refrigerator humming a note he has apparently stopped hearing. You open the laptop on the counter and the wheel is there, and you realize no one in him ever could have done what you wanted tonight. Not a flaw you could name. You wanted to be looked at by someone and be believed, and he has never once been looked at that way. Your thumb, his thumb, presses.

Then the stove light is gone and a blue flame is under a pan. Your right hand is stirring. Something in the pan, onions and ground meat, the fat popping. The stirring stops mid-circle, and your wrist, which does not know you yet, starts again the other way. You taste nothing. You reach for the salt and shake it over the pan without looking, and the hand knows how much.

The body first. Light, quick, twenty years old, a spine that doesn't announce itself. Your lungs feel scraped at the bottom, a pack a day, and the craving sits behind the breastbone like a held note. Your tongue finds the gap in your front teeth and rests there as if it lives there.

Now the kitchen starts giving him up. The counter edge presses your hip, and with it comes a night shift's end, sunrise over a runway, the first cigarette lit with the tailgate of a truck still cold. The navy T-shirt on your back is soft from washing, and the morning comes up through it sleeve by sleeve: he pulled it over his head, left arm first, because the tattoo on the left upper arm still tightens when it's new-healed, the cross and the praying hands, a thing he did the week he enlisted, for his mother, who kneels on Sunday mornings in a different state. He stood at the bathroom mirror and shaved, slow, jaw tilted, and ran his palm over it twice to be sure. The jeans come next, the denim stiff at the knee, the belt pulled one notch tighter than last month because the work has made him lean. The shirt rubs the piercing at his chest and you feel his private small defiance in it, a thing no chaplain knows.

The spatula's handle is warm. Through it: a flight line at dusk, orange ear defenders around his neck, a cargo plane's ramp dropping with a groan, a sergeant saying his name right for the first time. His pride goes through you like swallowed heat. Under your sneakers the tile is cold and sticky in one spot, and you get a night he ate alone in this room and prayed over it anyway, out loud, quietly, to nobody who answered, and kept doing it.

Then the cabinet. Your hand lifts a second plate down without asking you, the way it has for no one, and sets it beside the first. You don't know why. The feeling that comes with it is his: a hope with no face, kept ready.

You look at your hands. Turn them over. The knuckles are smooth, the palms dry, a faint burn of onion on the fingers. They are good hands. They are not yours.

You lift your eyes to the black window, to the face in it with the gap-toothed mouth, and say, "Well. Hello, Terrell."

The flame ticks blue under the pan. You wonder how long he'll hold, whether the wanting stays quiet in him tomorrow, or tonight.